Dear Zoe

Dear Zoe

Author
Philip Beard

Plot Summary
Several thousand people died on September 11, 2001. The date alone grabs one’s attention and screams REMEMBER THIS DAY. We see the burning tower and the second airliner crashing into the tower’s twin. News reports of the Pentagon and Pennsylvania tragedies spread new shockwaves, while images of the towers collapsing upon the thousands of souls inside sear our sorrow. Philip Beard frames his poignant YA novel Dear Zoe around that day. But not as one would expect.

It was an ordinary day for 15-year-old Tess DeNunzio—ordinary in as much as she’d missed the bus to school yet again and was biding time until her mother would drive her to school. The day became extraordinary when news of the Twin Towers exploded in her life. Of the thousands of people who died that day one of them would impact Tess and her family with the same gripping grief, but played out in a Pittsburgh emergency room.

In the confusion of those moments, when the eyes of the world were on the Twin Towers, Tess’s three-year-old sister Zoe was hit and killed by a car. That Zoe died that infamous day haunts Tess as much as losing her all together. It drives Tess through an adolescence already complicated by enigmatic feelings for her successful stepfather; her doting, but low-life father; her mother’s descent into depression; blended-family issues informed by these dynamics, and finally her emerging sexuality.

While the world still shivers from the terror of 9/11, Tess stretches to understand and eventually seek her own redemption by writing letters to Zoe. In these letters we glimpse the intimate details of Tess’s life, from her obsessive make-up ritual in the mornings, to her lack-luster performance at school, to her first boyfriend and where that predictably goes. Tess’s letters to Zoe dig at the scab covering Zoe’s death, picking and peeling until Tess confronts the awful truth about Zoe’s death.

Characters
Tess DeNunzio
Tess is a typical fifteen year old teenager who is facing problems in the form of her parents divorcing and having a new stepfather. She was the member in the family that reacted most to Zoe’s death. She acts impassive during her sister’s funeral, but really, she is aching inside, a feeling waiting to be triggered, and finally released during an intercourse with her father’s neighbor, Jimmy.

Daphne Baxter-Gladstone
Tess’s mother, who suffered from depression after Zoe’s death, and was the person who caused Tess to run away to her father’s house late at night.

Sam DeNunzio
Tess’s biological father who works as a lowly plumber and secretly smokes pot without Tess’s knowing. He welcomed Tess’s arrival in the late night with a surprised stare but was glad he had her daughter back in his arms. Tess still thinks of him as her real father, even though he was almost broke.

Greg Gladstone
Greg is Tess’s stepfather and biological father to Zoe Gladstone. He is a successful manager of an electronics company, but doesn’t show bias towards his stepchild. Even though Tess was more wary than afraid or dislike of him, she realizes that he is a responsible father and accepts him in the end.

Jimmy Cranker
Jimmy lives next door to Sam DeNunzio, and secretly climbs up to Tess’s bedroom every night without her father’s knowing. He had also encouraged her to take up a job at the theme park where he worked. He was Tess’s first boyfriend.

Personal reflections
‘Dear Zoe’ revolves around a teenager’s life full of dastardly woes that lie in the path of growing up. Barely a teenager yet, Tess has already been through so much hurdles; her mother’s divorce, the pressure of living with her stepfather, and finally, the death of her three-year-old sister, Zoe. Even before she had died, Tess had loved Zoe dearly as if she was her biological sibling instead of her stepsister. So when Zoe died (knocked over by a reversing car in her neighbourhood) Tess was more than angry; she was furious, a feeling most teenagers feel instead of sorrow whenever dealt with word-spinning ordeals.

What made her even angrier was the fact that no one would ever remember the death of Zoe Gladstone. On a normal day, news like this would surely make it to the newspaper, no matter how small and unimportant the section it is printed under; about the carelessness of drivers and parents and such. However, there were millions of deaths that day, and Tess herself would have been devastated by the nationwide disaster if not for the death of her sister. It had made Zoe’s death seemed all the more trivial.

Tess had never shown any sign of sorrow or grief during Zoe’s funeral, and she herself wondered why. She had been living through the days of her sister’s absence with complete calmness, save for the times she had sudden impulses to do things her own way, like stealing away to her father’s house after having had enough of her mother’s ‘what-ifs’. There, she meets Jimmy a teenager just like her whom she could spill all her problems to without seeming overemotional.

Tess’s letters to Zoe consisted of her life before and after Zoe’s death. It showed how much had changed in Tess’s life after she died. She had turned from a bubbly kid to her stuck up teen who smoked pot. However, the climax was displayed when an influx of emotions came rushing at her during an intercourse with Jimmy, when she felt all the despair and depression she had hid in the secluded corners of her cold heart during the first few days of Zoe’s demise. Before, she had tried to hide from the truth of her sister’s death, but now, all she could do was confront the truth bravely without withering the slightest. It turned out to become a moving story about Tess realizing the impact and implications Zoe’s absence had on her life.

Rating
8/10